The race and gender that earns the most in America despite discrimination

by SB on July 5, 2016 at 10:00am

People of which race and gender earn the most in America, do you think? If your answer is white men you would be wrong. Now ask yourself, which race and gender is most likely to be discriminated against when it comes to getting a university education in America? If your answer is black women you are not only wrong, you are not even in the ballpark. Black women are now the most educated group in America.

This morning, the Pew Research Center released a new report on how Americans are paid by race and gender — and boy, are there some bombshells for those interested in our nation’s wage disparities…

1. America’s top earners are Asian men

…All groups trail white men in earnings — except Asian men. They made 117 percent of what white men earned in 2015:
Last year, average hourly wages for black and Hispanic men were $15 and $14, while white men pocketed $21 and Asian men made $24.

-washingtonpost.com

Some of us might assume that the reason Asian men earn the most is because they are more educated than other races. We all know the stereotype of the hardworking and hard-studying Asian. The secret of their success must be their university education at top universities, some would assume. There is one little problem with that assumption: because of affirmative action, Asian students are experiencing rejection from top Ivy League schools even when they have almost perfect scores.

MICHAEL WANG, a young Californian, came second in his class of 1,002 students; his ACT score was 36, the maximum possible; he sang at Barack Obama’s inauguration; he got third place in a national piano contest; he was in the top 150 of a national maths competition; he was in several national debating-competition finals. But when it came to his university application he faced a serious disappointment for the first time in his glittering career. He was rejected by six of the seven Ivy League colleges to which he applied.

“I saw people less qualified than me get better offers,” says Mr Wang. “At first I was just angry. Then I decided to turn that anger to productive use.” He wrote to the universities concerned. “I asked: what more could I have done to get into your college? Was it based on race, or what was it based on?” He got vague responses—or none. So he complained to the Department of Education. Nothing came of it. “The department said they needed a smoking gun.”

In May this year Mr Wang joined a group of 64 Asian-American organisations that made a joint complaint to the Department of Education against Harvard, alleging racial discrimination. That follows a lawsuit filed last year against Harvard and the University of North Carolina by a group of Asian-American students making similar charges. The department rejected the claim in July, but another two complaints have since been filed by Asian-Americans, one against Harvard and one against nine other universities.

…The Japanese—the only Asian group mostly born in America and more likely than not to marry a non-Asian—are closer in attitudes and educational level to the American population as a whole. But on average Asian-Americans are unusually well educated, prosperous, married, satisfied with their lot and willing to believe in the American dream: 69% of Asians, compared with 58% of the general public, think that “most people who want to get ahead can make it if they are willing to work hard.”

It is their educational outperformance that is most remarkable: 49% of Asian-Americans have a bachelor’s degree, compared with 28% of the general population. degree, compared with 30% of recent non-Asian migrants.

Why do they do so well? …Their data suggested that Asian outperformance is thanks in large part to hard work. Ms Hsin and Ms Xie’s study showed a sizeable gap in effort between Asian and white children, which grew during their school careers

…Thanks to such pressures and hard work, many Asian-Americans do end up in top universities—but not as many as their high-school performance would seem to merit. Some Asians allege that the Ivy Leagues have put an implicit limit on the number of Asians they will admit. They point to Asians’ soaring academic achievements and to the work of Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Walton Radford of Princeton, who looked at the data on admissions and concluded that Asian-Americans need 140 SAT points out of 1,600 more than whites to get a place at a private university, and that blacks need 310 fewer points. Yet in California, where public universities are allowed to use economic but not racial criteria in admissions, 41% of Berkeley’s enrolments in 2014 were Asian-Americans and at the California Institute of Technology 44% were (see chart).

Racial prejudice of the sort that Jews faced may or may not be part of the problem, but affirmative action certainly is. Top universities tend to admit blacks and Hispanics with lower scores because of their history of disadvantage; and once the legacies, the sports stars, the politically well-connected and the rich people likely to donate new buildings (few of whom tend to be Asian) have been allotted their places, the number for people who are just high achievers is limited.

Several states have banned the use of race as a criterion for admission to their public institutions and there have been several lawsuits against affirmative action.

For the moment the court has taken the view that universities may take race into account, but racial quotas are not on. The Ivies deny running a racial quota. But in its comment on the Asian groups’ complaint, Harvard defends the use of race as a criterion in admission—“a class that is diverse on multiple dimensions, including on race, transforms the educational experience of students from every background and prepares our graduates for an increasingly pluralistic world”—and describes its admissions process as “holistic”, meaning it takes into account considerations wider than mere test scores.

Many Asian parents think this is wrong. They woke up a long time ago to the need to counter the stereotype of the maths-nerd Asian who does nothing but work, and encouraged their children to diversify—into music, debating, charity work, sports, everything that is supposed to increase students’ chances of admission. But many who have excelled in those areas, including Mr Wang and Irene Liu, a student from Massachusetts with a similarly stellar CV, were rejected by the Ivy League. Ms Liu’s mother, Tricia, says, “I feel angry about it. We came for the American dream: you work hard, you do well. This just doesn’t add up.” Irene has accepted a place at a top Canadian university, and is happy about it. Her mother isn’t: “It breaks my heart that she’s going abroad. If she had gone to Harvard, I could have brought her dumplings.”

-economist.com

I have never supported affirmative action. Affirmative action is racist because it assumes that black people and other minorities can only achieve if we lower the bar. Affirmative action also reflects badly on people who succeeded because they were the best. If we know, for example, that white students have to be the best to become a doctor, whereas black students do not have to achieve to the same level in order to be accepted, how much trust are we going to have in a black doctor? The black doctor may have been the top of her class and she may have achieved success on her own merits not because of affirmative action but, because of affirmative action, no patient can ever be sure that she is there because she was the best.

Affirmative action, as we have seen, excludes the very best students from being accepted into the top universities because of their race. There is nothing affirmative about it. It is discrimination, plain and simple.

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